Snippets

I am a libertarian socialist. My goal is the end of capitalism and its replacement by socialism, ‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’My politics

Marx was relentlessly critical, always seeking new knowledge and deeper understanding, never feeling that his own understanding of any subject was adequate - hence his well-known difficulties in finishing any work because he was never finished investigating the subject matter in its infinite ramifications.On Rosa Luxemburg

The shadow which haunts the power structure is the danger that those who are controlled will come to realize that they are powerless only so long as they think they are. Once people stop believing they are powerless, then the whole edifice which they
support is in danger of collapse.

It’s no wonder that the mainstream media are widely distrusted, and even held in contempt, by many people. They are seen, rightly, as part of the neoliberal system people are increasingly rejecting. On the other hand, the Internet has made it possible to launch a vast number of alternative media projects.

Marx breathes dialectics and revolution. For Marx, radicalism means going to the root, and Marx–s radicalism seeks to go to the root of capitalism, to comprehend its essence dialectically, to understand its inherent contradictions – and the seeds of revolution it contains...

Our task is to break out of this closed self-justifying system by depriving governments of the passive populations they need, by refusing to accept the choices we are offered and instead becoming active participants pressuring them to accept our proposals.

A constant theme in elite reaction to the Brexit referendum, expressed especially through the mainstream media, has been a visceral contempt for democracy. Ordinary working people are portrayed as stupid and reactionary, incapable of understanding how wonderful the European Union project is. Again and again, one hears the comment that the great unwashed should not be allowed to vote on issues which they are incapable of understanding. This reaction is not new: ruling classes for centuries have loathed democracy, which is seen as an existential threat to the wealth and privileges of the elite.

Our society is obsessed with the short-term present. It devalues memories and the past. That’s the nature of capitalism, especially the speeded-up hypercapitalism of today. The past is useless: profits are made by getting rid of the old and replacing it with something new.

It’s counterproductive to say that for the sake of “unity” we shouldn’t criticize others in the environmental movement. Principled debate and critcism when it is called for helps us clarify issues and move forward.

Corporations have increasingly become legally unaccountable for their behaviour. All too often corporations break the law and engage in criminal acts which would be severely punished if they were committed by ordinary individuals. These illegal acts range from deliberate health and safety violations that cost lives, to land seizures, to environmental negligence that contaminates lands and waters. Most of these illegal acts are never prosecuted, and those that are, are usually dealt with by a fine that corporations can treat as a cost of doing business.

When we throw around indiscriminate terms like ‘male violence’ and give credence to theories that men are inherently violent, we are slandering men who are not violent and, unthinkingly, we are actually perpetuating the stereotype that
to be a man is to be violent.

This city, which usually seems far too cynical and hurried to care very much about anything any more, has been deeply shocked and violently angered by the murder of the little shoe-shine boy, Emmanuel Jaques, on Yonge Street.

It’s a difficult thing to measure, but there are strong reasons for believing that the number of people struggling with depression has increased significantly in recent decades. Despite the evidence that this is a social problem, and not merely an individual misfortune, the solutions and escapes on offer are almost all individual: pharmaceuticals and therapy, on the one hand; self-medication with alcohol, streets drugs, television, etc., on the other.

People looking at the United States from the outside tend to assume that life is easy when you're an imperialist superpower in command of the world’s largest military forces, backed by the world’s most powerful economy. With so much power concentrated in your hands, what could possibly go wrong?

Ultimately all power structures depend on the obedience of those over whom they rule. It helps if people believe in the legitimacy of those who wield power, but the crucial thing is obedience. Once people start to disobey in significant numbers, the dynamic of power changes fundamentally. Disobedience, especially on a large scale, shakes the power of the rulers, and increases the power of those who disobey.

“Fake news” is the latest mania to convulse the mainstream media. All at once, we’re being subjected to an outbreak of hand-wringing articles and commentaries about obscure websites which are supposedly poisoning public opinion and undermining democracy by spreading “fake news.”

We have to abolish a system whereby a tiny handful with a lot of money can decide how thousands of other people are going to live, how thin their walls are going to be, how much sunshine they’ll be able to get, where their children will play.

The ordinary citizens of Greece (and other countries) never saw the money loaned to ‘Greece’ and derived no benefit from it. Yet they are expected to suffer the elimination of their jobs, wages, pensions, health and social services, etc., in order to repay the money looted by the oligarchs.

How can we reach the millions we need to reach and engage if fundamental change is to happen? How can we accomplish the essential task of persuading a majority of the population that a fundamental social and economic transformation is necessary?

People who advocate a vision of distinct communities that speak different languages, keep apart from each other, and communicate with the structures of the larger society only through interpreters, are doing more harm than good. What they are advocating is not diversity but entrenched division.

Normally, I delete the spam that gets past the filter into my mailbox as quickly as anyone. But I do have a sneaking fondness for those occasional carefully crafted letters that tell a complete and compelling story. Some of these are almost works of literature, little Chekovian gems in their own way. If Alice Munro fell on hard times and had to support herself writing spam, these are the stories she would tell to get her hands on our banking information.

“There is no alternative.” That is capitalism’s message in the neo-liberal era. The rich keep getting richer and richer, millions of people are unemployed, millions more are trying to survive on precarious, marginal, and part-time work, hundreds of millions are without health care, housing, education, or clean water. Environmental collapse is increasingly likely, masses of people are fleeing wars and economic disasters, nuclear war is a real danger. And all that the corporate elite, the corporate media, and the mainstream political parties have to offer is their insistence that there is nothing we can do about it: there is no alternative.

Press freedom is under attack, computer systems and police files are undermining our privacy, books are being banned, trials are being held is secret, police powers are being greatly expanded, governments are competing with each other in passing repressive legislation.

Canadian socialists are terribly reluctant to give up their illusions about the NDP. No matter how often we are beaten over the head with the hard facts, no matter how often the party lets us down, no matter how far to the right it drifts, we don’t want to face the bitter truth.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election, a debate has erupted on the liberal left about the best way to deal with working class people who voted for Trump. The disagreement, for many of the participants, appears to revolve around whether liberals ought to spend their time giving patronizing lectures about white privilege, or patronizing lectures about other aspects of reality. What people on both sides of the debate seem to share is the assumption that the job of middle-class liberals is to lecture the working class.

The revolutionary upheavals in Eastern Europe are an inspiration for everyone working for social change and show us that even the most seemingly entrenched system of control can be overthrown by popular movements.

Democracy as defined by the corporate media is a safe election every four years or so in which voters choose between corporate-dominated parties whose policies are virtually indistinguishable on all fundamental issues.

Since medicare is an extremely popular social program, the media and right-wing politicians have learned that it is unwise to attack it directly. Instead, they propagate myths designed to undermine public support for, and confidence in, the health care system, with the goal of gradually undermining and dismantling it.

When we talk about the Right, it is well to keep in mind that “the Right” is by no means a unified political force or organization, but rather a label used to describe a disparate collection of ideologies, parties, groups, and individuals.

We are never left in any doubt about who our enemies are. The word goes out from the United States that a certain country is a dictatorship which abuses human rights, supports terrorism, and poses a terrible threat to the U.S. and to the world. The mainstream media then swing into action with military precision and flood us with stories, images, and commentary about how dreadful country ‘X’ is.

Change requires organizing. Power gives way only when it is challenged by a movement for change, and movements grow out of organizing. Organizing is qualitatively different from simple “activism”. Organizing means sustained long-term conscious effort to bring people together to work for common goals. This is a selection of articles, books, and other resources related to organizing.

Perhaps the most striking thing about most politicians is that they seem completely incapable of giving a straight answer to anything, of talking in ordinary language, of communicating. Language for them isn’t a way of getting ideas across, but of confusing people so they won’t understand what’s really going on.

Glaberman insists that the working class is not merely a victim of capitalism — working people are active participants in creating their own consciousness, their methods of struggle and their own
history.

It is becoming increasingly clear that we have been witnessing a drastic rolling back of the systems and structures which Western societies developed over the past century or more to safeguard public health and safety. Politicians and business leaders, permeated with free-market ideology, have been jettisoning, with little thought or understanding of the consequences, the apparatus previous generations built, piece by piece, to mitigate the most dangerous aspects of industrial civilization.

Class conflict – first and foremost, the relationship between the capitalist class and the working class – is the fundamental contradiction that defines capitalist society. Class is a reality which simultaneously encompasses and collides with other dimensions of oppression and domination, such as gender and race.

Neoliberalism is a fraud. The so-called free markets and free trade which it pretends to promote are in fact controlled by giant corporations, and massively subsidized by workers and ordinary citizens.

A critique of Dances with Guilt said comments and attitudes are forms of ‘violence’ comparable to, or worse than, physical violence. This response argues
that while verbal and emotional abuse can be very hurtful, beating someone up is qualitatively different from verbal aggression, and we should not say they are the same.

Civil liberties and human rights appear as a key dimension in almost every other field of social justice and social change, but those who seek a freer and more just society cannot rely on the state to achieve their goals.

Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary perspective includes supporting pressure for reforms within capitalism, but she is utterly clear that reforms cannot bring about fundamental change, that socialism can only come about through revolution.

Our society and its institutions, public and private, regularly tell us that science, and education in the sciences, are crucial to our future. These public declarations are strangely reminiscent of the equally sincere lip service they pay to the ideals of democracy. And, in the same way that governments and private corporations devote considerable efforts to undermining the reality of democracy, so too they are frequently found trying to block and subvert science when the evidence it produces runs counter to their interests. Real live scientists doing real live science, it seems, are not nearly as loveable as Science in the abstract.

It is one of the essential attributes of power that it insists on secrecy. Or, more precisely, those who wield power over others routinely claim that the details of what they do, and why they do it, are far too sensitive to be revealed to the public.

I used to be a hard-boiled cynic when it came to those alleged miraculous apparations of religious or pop culture figures whose images are always being spotted in various and sundry mundane objects. Jesus in a tortilla, the Virgin Mary in a watermelon, Elvis in a peanut butter sandwich – I scoffed. Until this week, when something quite extraordinary happened.

Emotional issues are potent. Left-leaning and reform candidates can be very vulnerable if right-wing groups are able to seize on emotional questions and make them issues during the an election campaign.

Sports in general, and the Olympics in particular, have never been free of politics. Allegations of bribery and cheating had already been part of the Olympics for centuries before that noteworthy day in 67 AD when the judges proclaimed the Emperor Nero winner of the Olympic chariot race even though he had been thrown from his chariot and failed to complete the race.

Whether we’re ready to believe it or not, spring is upon us, and if we go out and look for it, we’ll come across signs that establish that fact much more firmly and decisively than the passing moods of the weather.

Governments apply a double standard. They demand that public transit pay for itself and that health care and education be judged by ‘cost-benefit’ analyses. But they apply no such standard to industrial policy where billions of dollars are shelled out.

The essence of the capitalist economic system is the drive to accumulate as much as possible, by any means possible. It is almost inevitable, therefore, that those – individuals or corporations – whose existence revolves around accumulating capital will seek to avoid paying taxes.

The Internet, at one time a free & open space for sharing information & ideas, has been privatized & twisted to serve the profit-making agenda of huge corporations, working hand-in-glove with governments which want to suppress opposition & criticism. What happened? Is it their Internet or Ours?

Does that familiar canon of the left, ‘the right to self-determination’, actually mean anything, or is it an empty slogan whose main utility is that it relieves us of the trouble of thinking critically?

Today, in the neo-liberal phase of capitalism, neo-liberal ideology is dominant in the universities. Neo-liberalism denies the idea of class, denies that there are any alternatives to capitalism, and rejects so-called ‘grand theories’ which view capitalism as a historical period with a beginning and an eventual end.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiated in secret, and designed to be rubber-stamped by national governments on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, is best understood as a major milestone in the long-term war waged by the corporate elite against any form of democracy. It gives corporations the power to block any environmental protections or health and safety legislation that could be interpreted as interfering with a corporation’s ‘right’ to make a profit by doing whatever it wants.

Utopian visions, be they practical or not, free our imaginations, if only for a little while, from the daily grind of struggle and worry, and allow us to dream about the kind of world we would hope to live in. Such dreams can inspire us and guide us, even if they are not always quite practical.

A British dermatologist has managed to get himself worldwide publicity with an article suggesting that Karl Marx’s painful skin condition may have caused him to say all those mean things about capitalism.

What are we eating? A simple question which opens up a labyrinth of devilishly complex issues about production and distribution, access to land, control of water, prices, health and safety, migrant labour, and much else?

Canada expelled Russian diplomats on the strength of unsubstantiated allegations that Russia was involved in the poisoning of a former spy in Britain. Will Canada now expel Israeli diplomats in condemnation of Israel’s latest massacre in Gaza?

Many elements of the environmental movement have been guilty of ignoring working people, while others actually blame ordinary working people for climate change and the injustices associated with it. Yet it is working people who are dying, in many places, even now, from excessive heat in factories, fields, construction sites, and homes. And million of working people stand to lose their jobs, homes, and communities in the transition to a low-carbon or no-carbon economy.

The Connexions Digest was published by Connexions from 1976 to 1994 (with some variations in the name during the years of its publication). I was a member of the editorial collective from issue #36 to the final print issue in 1994 (#55). I also edited two issues of The Connexions Annual, in 1989 and 1994. All of Connexions’ print publications have been digitized and are available on the Connexions website.

I started working for Sources in the mid-1990s. At that time, Sources was a print publication, a book, typically around 200-360 pages thick, which was published twice a year and distributed to approximately 14,000 journalists and media professionals across Canada. The bulk of it was a directory of experts, with a comprehensive subject index (now online). It also featured articles on journalism and issues affecting journalists, as well as book reviews, especially of books related to research and the media. I became the publisher of Sources, and of two related directories/sourcebooks that grew out of it: Parliamentary Names & Numbers and Media Names & Numbers. I also wrote some book reviews and articles for Sources and for the Sources.com website which launched in 1996. A number of back issues of Sources, Media Names & Numbers, and Parliamentary Names & Numbers are available to be downloaded as PDFs via the Downloads page. Articles published in the print publications or on the Sources website are available via Sources Select Resources.

The Medical Reform Group of Ontario (MRG) was a physicians' organization founded by doctors who were concerned that there was no voice for progressive, socially-conscious physicians. The organization was based on three founding principles: 1. Quality health care is a right that must be guaranteed without financial or other deterrents; 2. All health care workers must address the causes of ill health in social, economic, environmental and occupational conditions, and work to change these; 3. The health care system must be changed to provide a more significant role for all health care workers and for the public.
Working with an editorial collective, I produced the Medical Reform newsletter from 1984 to 1995. Many of the issues of the newsletter have been digitized and are available online.